Hepatitis C is a common cause of liver disease with a number of extrahepatic manifestations. Approximately 25% of people with hepatitis C also have depression. This rate of depression is substantially higher than the rate of depression in the general population, with an associated cost of $1,038 million a year for treatment.

What do patients need to know?

Many do not know that hepatitis C is connected with conditions outside of the liver (the extrahepatic manifestations of HCV). In particular, many do not know that people with hepatitis C may be connected to depression as a neuropsychiatric manifestation of HCV.

Our study was carried out to see if hepatitis C was connected to depression, and if so, how many people might be affected, and compare this number to the number of people with depression in the population without HCV. We also wanted to see what the cost of having hepatitis C and depression might be.

So we reviewed all the medical literature from the early 1990s to 2014, looking for articles that studied HCV and depression.

We found that approximately 25% of people with hepatitis C also have depression. This rate of depression is almost 20% higher than the rate of depression in the general population and costs $1,038 million a year to treat